Thursday, October 25. 2012

In 1400 author Geoffrey Chaucer died in London. In 1415 England won the Battle of Agincourt (in northern France) over France during the Hundred Years' War. Almost 6000 Frenchmen were killed while fewer than 400 were lost by the English. In 1760 Britain's King George III succeeded his late grandfather, George II. In 1854 the "Charge of the Light Brigade" took place during the Crimean War as an English brigade of more than 600 men, facing hopeless odds, charged the Russian army during the Battle of Balaclava and suffered heavy losses. In 1881 Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. In 1918 the Canadian steamship Princess Sophia foundered off the coast of Alaska; nearly 400 people perished. In 1929 former Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall was convicted of accepting a $100,000 bribe in connection with the Elk Hills Naval Oil Reserve in California, in the Harding Administration scandal known as "Teapot Dome." In 1936 Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini signed a treaty creating the Rome-Berlin Axis. In 1962 US ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson presented photographic evidence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba to the UN Security Council. In 1971 the UN General Assembly voted to admit mainland China and expel Taiwan. In 1983 a US-led force invaded Grenada at the order of President Reagan, who said the action was needed to protect US citizens there. In 2000 divers found and removed the first bodies from the wreckage of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, with the loss of all 118 sailors aboard. In 2004 the US Supreme Court announced that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had thyroid cancer.